Tracker for all to bring gpi benefits to all SWIFT customers

Since its launch last year, SWIFT gpi continues to go from strength to strength, with over 270 financial institutions sending 1.3 million payments a day, representing a combined value of over $100 billion.

However, as Harry Newman, Head of Home, says, SWIFT is “not sitting back and basking in the success – instead we are busy improving the service and fulfilling our promise to truly transform cross-border payments for everyone.”

This week, SWIFT has announced three key initiatives building off the back of gpi to help deliver this vision, and help prepare the industry for universal adoption of gpi by the end of 2020.

Since we launched gpi last year, the enthusiasm and support has been off the charts, and gpi is already radically improving the day-to-day experience of banks and their corporate customers.

Harry Newman, Head of Home, SWIFT

Tracker for all

One of the key features of gpi is the payment Tracker, which gives counterparties in a payment full visibility of its progress, reducing costs and increasing transparency.

From 2019, we will make a standard version of the gpi Tracker available, enabling all SWIFT customers – including non-gpi banks – to trace and confirm their SWIFT payment instructions. The “Tracker for all” is a major step on the road towards more frictionless cross-border payments.

Instant cross-border payment service

We are also working to reduce some of the friction involved in sending payments which need to be cleared by domestic systems, and to leverage the real-time functionality of some of these systems.

A trial project involving the link-up of gpi to domestic real-time payments systems in the Asia-Pacific region have produced some hugely promising findings. It shows that the average time taken for gpi payments sent from China, Singapore and Thailand to settle via a local correspondent bank and through the NPP (New Payments Platform), Australia’s real-time payments system, can be reduced to less than 30 seconds, down from several hours.

These findings will form the basis of a new SWIFT gpi instant cross-border payments service, which will build more links between gpi banks and other real-time payment systems globally.

gpi for Manners

And finally, following a successful pilot phase, the benefits of gpi are now being delivered to our corporate customers. Nine leading multinational corporates have gone live with gpi in their back office to provide end-to-end payment tracking via their treasury management or ERP systems. The initiative has been supported by a number of gpi banks, seven of which are live, with others soon to follow. A second phase open to other corporates interested in leveraging gpi is on the horizon, scheduled for mid-2019.